Are We Defending a Faith or a Civilisation?

This question has been on my mind for some time now. Much of what I read comes from the Anglican world, so the response is in some measure to much of that, but I see the same kind of thing in Evangelical circles also. The difference between the two is that the Anglicans usually have some idea of where their idea comes from while Evangelicals aren’t much on stopping and examining the origins of things other than to appeal to “It is written…” That’s fine if it really is written, but in many cases it is not, we only impose our idea on what we read.

The problem Christians in the West face is the simple fact that we are to a large extent the victims of our own success. Western civilisation owes a great deal to its Christian roots, so it’s easy to turn to Christian imagery when we rise to defend our civilisation. But there are several facts we must face:

Christianity wasn’t founded as either a civilisation or a political system. In this it’s different from Islam. It’s easier to make the argument that Christianity was founded in opposition to the whole idea that our happiness in this life and the next is dependent upon something other than political considerations, which puts it in opposition to liberalism as understood in the West these days.

The problem in the early church, therefore, was not the temptation toward legalistic works righteousness. They faced the communal challenge of incorporating non-Jewish converts into the historically Jewish people of God. First-century Judaism didn’t have a legalism problem; it had an ethnocentrism problem. The first followers of Jesus were all Jewish, and had difficulty imagining that the God of Israel who sent Jesus Christ as their Savior could possibly save non-Jews without requiring them to convert to Judaism. This is the issue in Acts 15, when Christian Jews from Judea urged the Gentiles in Antioch, “Unless you are circumcised, according to the custom taught by Moses, you cannot be saved” (Acts 15:1).

The blood of the pagan was his life; to achieve a life outside of the blood of his tribe, the pagan had to acquire a new blood. It is meaningless to promise men life in the Kingdom of Heaven without a corresponding life in this world; Christianity represents a new people of God, with an existence in this life. That is why Christianity requires that the individual undergo a new birth. To become a Christian, every child who comes into the world must undergo a second birth, to become by blood a new member of the Tribe of Abraham. Protestants who practice baptism through total immersion in water simply reproduce the ancient Jewish ritual of conversion, which requires that the convert pass through water, just as he did in leaving his mother’s womb, to undergo a new birth that makes him a physical descendant of Abraham. Through baptism, Christians believe that they become Abraham’s progeny.

We have to face the reality that those who own and operate the West these days have decided to do so without Christianity. In the context of our present money favouring pseudodemocracy anything we do to “defend” Christian values in that civilisation is only a delaying tactic. The nearly two score of war over abortion should have taught us this, but now we have same-sex civil marriage to remind us again.

We must realise that those outside of our “civilisation” who share the name of Jesus are closer to us than our own ethnic kindred. The most spectacular demonstration of this is the African rescue of what I call the “Anglican Revolt” against the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in Canada, and now the Church of England itself. We’re seeing the concept of the centre of Anglicanism–whose name itself speaks of a land and a people–being seen as moved to another continent and race.

We must ultimately be prepared to see the dissolution of the “system of things” here in the West–and the blurring of our own ethnic homogeneity–if that leads to the advance of real Christianity in this world. We need to be Christians first even if that bothers everyone else. And I’m not talking about a revolution either: as I’ve hammered before and will again, our elites are so singularly unable to lead this mess that they will do the job of destruction for us. In some ways that’s what we saw in Late Rome, a state whose centralisation led to it collapsing by its own weight, certainly in the West.

It’s not going to be pretty and it’s not going to be fun, but if we keep “defending a civilisation” that doesn’t want us any more, we’ll end up losing both the faith and the civilisation.